


My boy.

by sabrina



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-23
Updated: 2010-09-23
Packaged: 2017-10-22 03:09:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabrina/pseuds/sabrina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Father's longing; c. 1967.</p><br/><table><tbody><tr><td></td>
</tr></tbody></table>
            </blockquote>





	My boy.

I know he believes he’s too good for me and too good for this life. I know he believes he’s too good for this place, but that’s all I have to offer him and I won’t lie and say it don’t smart when he turns his back on it. Some days I know he’s my boy, he’s good with his hands, and he’s got an intuitive knack at that sort of practical stuff and such and he’d be a good mill worker too. Make a management position, possibly even. There’s room for that if you’re keen on your work and got the ambition to make it, and he does. I know he does cause I did before the mills cut the jobs and bloody foreigners took what was left. He might get out of this place; get hisself a modern flat, a pretty girl, have a boy of his own he’d try to teach the ways of life. He’s smart as a whip and if he’d just apply himself to primary school, and suit himself up a bit, he’d make something of himself and maybe even go on to take A Levels and go on to University.

That’d be something worth doing, none of that silly magic wand nonsense his Mum’s filled his head with.

Some nights I’m not certain he is my boy. I look in his eyes, and the only thing I recognise there is the colour and that’s when I remember his Mum’s eyes is dark too. I keep trying to show him the things he’s got to learn if he’s going to be a productive man in this world, but he ain’t listening and maybe I’m showing him wrong. Maybe I ain’t got the knack his Mum does, but the reality I’m trying to give him ain’t going to compete with the make-belief shit she fills his head with.

I know I’m losing him. I know it as surely as I know the feel of wool between my fingers, and the smell of a Brown Ale at the pub.

I try to pull him back. Take him out and show him things, but his interest is more keen to the books Eileen thinks I don’t know she shows him when I ain’t around. Bitch is poisoning his mind against me. Can’t use her magic to get food on the table, but she can use it to steal my son from me. Can’t hold a proper conversation with him but how could I when she got him so he ain’t interested in proper studies, or the mills, or the church? He’s too young to take down to the pub and set down in front of a stout and talking to him does about as much good as talking to a barstool.

Shake some sense into him? I tried that already. Tried smacking his rear end when he didn’t go to school too, and that sent him back for a day or two but not much more. Boxed him round the ears the other day, and can’t say I’m proud of that, but he was trying my patience. And he behaved himself after that.

For a few hours anyways.

I’m just trying to make him see there’s more to the world than his Mum’s fantasies. There’s more to who he is than this world that supposedly exists in London – _London_ – bunch of high up prissy bastards sitting in their chairs and making rules for the rest of us. They ain’t got no idea of what this country really needs, and ain’t no mind to listen to it. Kinda like these magic folk that hide from the rest of us, and look down on us mere morals, like they is gifted cause they can make sparks fly out of a stick. Don’t see what’s so special about that; I can do that come Guy Fawkes Day, y’know?

I keep trying. Just don’t know quite how to prepare him for this world. The more I try, the more I fuck up. I come to the conclusion Severus ain’t my boy. My boy would get the lessons I’m trying to teach and doing things together wouldn’t just be an exercise in seeing which of us can keep silent the longest. My boy’d be clever, and ambitious, and have a strong work ethic. He’d be someone that mattered. I don’t know – like a professor or some shit like that. Someone smart. Someone who makes the Snape name mean something. This sprog ain’t none of that. Fuck, he can’t even stand up straight when I take him down to the chemists.

  
  
  



End file.
